In the course of proofreading various manuscripts, I’ve come across a number of writers who have such a feel for language that every sentence is balanced, the sentences flow easily to make up a paragraph, and I truly have little to do but catch occasional typos.
I’ve also encountered a number of writers who regard such niceties as punctuation and grammar as no more than polite suggestions – the way I regard crescendo or staccato on a piece of music while I’m struggling just to get the right notes at the right tempo,
That’s not to say that the first group are Good Writers and the second are Bad Writers. A perfectly smooth MS can lie down and die for cardboard characters or lack of story. That manuscript that reads as though it were written with a hatchet may tell a story so fresh and intriguing that even old Punctuation Nazi here stays cheerful despite using gallons of red ink on each page.
But it’s also true that the writers in Group A have mastered a skill that the writers in Group B may not even know exists, and that skill is crucial for the presentation of their work.
How did they master it? Not by memorizing all those tedious ruled about comma splicing or dangling participles.
The main difference is that Group A writers are compulsive readers, and have been since the first day they saw Spot run. Group B writers are far more likely to prefer other media: movies, TV, YouTube, podcasts.
Most of the readers of this blog are Group A types who will read the label on a bottle of aspirin it there’s nothing else available, so they hardly need the advice I’m giving, but I’m going to give it anyway.
Read. Read novels, read history, read newspapers, read that label on the aspirin bottle. Feed your brain with hundreds of thousands of examples of competent writing, so that when you come to tell a story you can set it down without constantly wondering if a comma tossed into the middle of a long, tangled sentence will magically make your meaning clear. (Pro tip: it probably won’t.)
Now I’m going to say something that will annoy a lot of you.
Don’t read self-published books.to improve your writing.
Is that unfair to indie writers? Can’t they produce a smooth, polished work?
Sure they can. The catch is, there are absolutely no barriers to stop a much less literate writer from publishing his book, warts and all. And how can you tell which indie writers are good models of English usage?
If you’re still at the stage of reading as widely as possible to feed your own language generator, you can’t.
While I’m at it: when I said to read newspapers, I didn’t mean online news sites or blogs. When I need a short break from proofreading, sometimes I’ll spend a few minutes skimming online news. And since my head is still in proofreading mode, the grammatical warts on the content of these sites stand out as if they were printed in flashing red letters. A great deal of online prose is created by people desperate to get this or that news or opinion out first, which means you’re likely reading first drafts.
I recommend reading traditionally published books, and not even recently published ones; books from the twentieth century, back when editors actually did some editing. And if you can’t find any of those that interest you, read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, just for the music of his beautifully constructed sentences.
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “Playing the music, not just the notes”
…or P. G. Wodehouse, whose perfectly crafted sentences are a joy forever.
I read tons when I was younger, but I’ve definitely migrated to other media before writing.
I think I mentioned on Creative Chaos’s blog, what I’d wanted to do was video stories inspired by music. But, I just don’t have the time to learn and master the tools, so I started writing instead. Which is probably why my punctuation is a bit… odd…
Cool post. I even read one book that I caught myself falling into a trancelike state. That was a strange experience.
I have also found one well known modern author who is probably the best storyteller in the industry currently. Now, some of his stories were weak or offensive, but the storytelling was so good that I enjoyed them very much.
Oh, definitely this. Marinate yourself in good writing, especially good writing of an earlier age, and it can’t help but rub off on you.
I swear half my misspellings and brutal treatment of commas is due to the years I spent reading slush for Baen. Pity my poor unsuspecting Beta Reader/Grammarians.
Just channel your inner Conan the Grammarian…
Read writers who are noted for their styles. Lord Dunsany, the First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners In Fantasy, can have a good effect once you’ve got the Dunsany imitation out of your system.
Pastiches can, in fact, be a good way to master style, though they are exercises.
It’s Hemingway for me. I hated him in high school, and came to love him after I moved to Japan. I even had a boy in junior high school reading a passage from The Old Man and the Sea for the English speech contest in our town. But I’m not him, so I try not to come across as a Great Value-brand imitation.
Pride and Prejudice. Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde. Jungle Book. Daylight and Nightmare. And Then There Were None. Fashion in Shrouds. Gaudy Night. Cotillion. Perelandra. Unfinished Tales.
Self-published books do vary a lot. But so do traditionally published books. Not every trad pub book is a Gaudy Night or a Perelandra.
And it’s hard to absorb style from a book you find bland or worse. At least two of the books on your list hit me that way.
But the books you list are all classics in some degree, and the grammar skill shown in the prose helps put them there.
There are examples to be found in nonfiction as well. Churchill’s =History of the English-Speaking Peoples= would fit that category. So would the massive =The Shield of Achilles=, in which Philip Bobbitt shows how to write complex sentences that are both very readable and very long.
Assuming you’re addressing me, as the only person here with a full list. The problem with self-published versus tradpubbed is not that the former are less good; it’s that they’re too new to have stood the test of time you’re talking about, and too vast and uncharted for any one reader to really have a chance to figure out what good prose stylists are out there in the wild.
As for the list, they were meant as entertaining suggestions, not prescriptions. People should skip any they find offputting. BTW, I did include nonfiction in the shape of Stevenson’s “Open Letter,” chosen over his more famous works for its brevity.
Crescendo, staccato, all well and good. But legato is best.
*wry musician smile* Legato so long as you don’t have a conductor who forgets that choirs need to breathe, unlike orchestras. *loud choral gasp here*
What? You don’t do stagger breathing? (Breathe when you’re about ready to stagger.)